Cameras keep the peace in one neighborhood

BRISTOL TWP. – With “Big Brother” tactics, police officials have taken a big bite out of crime in the Bloomsdale section, where drugs were sold curbside for years and dealers and buyers sometimes battled with guns.

Buck County District Attorney David Heckler praised police Chief James McAndrew and the township’s top detective, Lt. Terry Hughes, for the cut in crime – but the officers said all those surveillance cameras watching the neighborhood are the reason.

They commented at a news conference last week where they announced an arrest in a 2006 Bloomsdale shooting death and said the slaying prompted federal authorities to put up more than 20 cameras that can monitor everything going on outside the collection of 1950s-era row houses off Green Lane.

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One resident questioned the 50-percent cut in crime estimate from the police, but she acknowledged crime is down and that there has been a marked improvement in the quality of life since the cameras were installed.

“I don’t mind,” the Big Brother part, she said as she stood beneath one of the surveillance cameras. “It’s peaceful out here in the morning now, none of the dealers hanging around and none of the riff raff coming in from outside to buy drugs.”

The case that prompted the $400,000 expenditure for cameras involved a 30-year-old union machinist from Levittown, Kevin Battista, with a girlfriend fond of cocaine, and 20-year-old Ckaron Handy, who allegedly always carried around a small handgun and was building a fearful reputation by pulling it on rivals in Bloomsdale.

Authorities said Battista was shot dead in part because Handy initially thought he was an undercover officer looking to make a “buy and bust,” at 2 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2006, Heckler said. The gunman told Battista, driving a red pickup truck, to get lost.

By the time Battista circled through the section and came back, Handy had been told the woman in the truck had purchased drugs there before and probably wasn’t a narc. That’s when, Heckler said, they decided instead to rob Battista of the $60 he had said he was carrying.

Handy, now 25 and facing the rest of his life in prison, allegedly shot Battista in the left shoulder with a small caliber bullet that angled into his aorta, killing him before he reached a nearby hospital.

Stories likes these had been frequently heard in the bad old days before the cameras went in. Now, cops said, the curbside dealers have taken their business elsewhere.

No one bothers the surveillance cameras, which are monitored back at headquarters, the chief said. “If they do they know we’ll see them and come and arrest them,” he said.

The woman taking her morning walk on Friday told The Trentonian she occasionally hears shots in the night and knows some dealing is still going on in the section. But it’s nothing like it used to be.

A 42-year-old who would not give her name, she is the mother of three, including a son now 25 whom she “lost to these streets a few years ago. I’m not letting them happen to my youngest son.”

Between the safer streets of Bloomsdale these days and her enrollment of the youngest boy at the Conwell-Egan Catholic High School, the mother thinks he’ll make out better than his older brother.